The exhibition featured work by international contemporary artists working in a variety of media, both textual and visual: Majid Adin, Forensic Oceanography (Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani), Ina Loungine, Janne Malmros, and Maria Tzanakou. Offering free admission, Refuse/Refuge coincided with and complemented York Art Gallery’s exhibition The Sea is the Limit.

Kyveli wrote about her experience curating the exhibition for the WRoCAH website.

Exhibition description:

The exhibition Refuse/Refuge explores the visual politics of the 21st-century Mediterranean refugee crisis. This crisis is underscored by many ‘political refusals’ where refuge, help or rescue has been refused. At the same time the exhibition presents another set of ‘refusals’ – ‘visual refusals’. Can we be responsible citizens without viewing the representation of death and suffering? In the context of Refuse/Refuge we ask you to reconsider your political stance not by looking at any images of suffering, but by looking at what could be seen as different types of ‘visual refusals’.

(Exhibition booklet)

At the core of the exhibition lies a series of ethically and politically troubling questions. What does it mean to refuse refuge to someone who has fled from their home countries due to war, violence and poverty? How can we approach these issues and our own ethical responsibility, without using a photojournalistic ‘lens’?

Booklet and Project Website

A free booklet accompanied the exhibition, containing information about the artworks and biographical notes of the artists, as well as an essay by co-curator Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, ‘On Political and Visual Refusals’, in which she contextualised the exhibition and critiqued the artworks within their framework of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.

In keeping with the intention that the booklet have open-access availability, much of its content is reproduced on the exhibition project's website, with a blog that aims to continue the discussion of issues highlighted in the exhibition. To date, it has published the following articles:

Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantanigave a Curator's Talk to the Friends of York Art Gallery on Sunday 12 August, as well as three Curator’s Guided Tours of the exhibition on Saturdays 4 August, 11 August and 15 September, as part of York Art Gallery’s free programme of events.